Women as Plot Devices: A Field Guide

So in pop culture, we have a lot of Strong Straight Male Protagonists. These days a male lead is a gender neutral lead, a safe lead, a bankable lead. But we can’t have a Strong Straight Male Protagonist without some layyydezzz! And a lot of the time, this works out great. You get your Mulder and Scully, your Sopranos, your Simpsons, and your Stabler and Benson: characters with equal depth, interest, variety and importance, regardless of gender.  

However, popular narratives often rely on some pretty reductive, gendered tropes. In pop culture ‘male’ is generally still a signifier for ‘everyone’; thus, we get varied, complex, strong male characters undefined by their gender. The Everyman. Alternatively, in many cases women are represented in limited, tokenistic ways, and often female characters are nothing more than breathing plot devices.

Like the One Ring in Middle Earth, or the Nerd-to-Babe Prom Makeover Transformation, a plot device is any tool which occurs or exists solely to progress the narrative forward. Take a sudden explosion, a gun shot in the distance, a blunt weapon to the skull, amnesia, and ya got a story of plot devices, kid! Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that a well-developed character should appear, in behaviour, motives, and mindset, to be an actual, whole, real person. A real person or well-developed character has autonomy and nuance, and cannot really be reduced into a plot device. 

The female characters we’re going to look at are simplistic, one-dimensional tropes and well-worn clichés, rather than fully-rounded characters. They exist as familiar plot devices to create motivation, conflict, or change within a male protagonist’s storyline. The plot is his road map; she’s merely a bump in the road.

The “woman as plot device” is ubiquitous in mainstream and indie, highbrow and lowbrow, Eastern and Western storytelling. They are already a frequent topic of academic and popular media criticism, which means that we, as audiences, are already discussing the meaning of gendered character tropes in our stories. 

The purpose of pointing out these tropes is not to write off entire texts as capital B Bad. The worth of a text is not so essential, and the point of analysis isn’t to ascribe value. The point is to draw attention to a clearly gendered imbalance in popular fiction, one that is deeply inscribed into our ideas about storytelling, and which sells us, as readers in a community that includes women, entirely short. To continue dredging these clichés up is nothing short of lazy storytelling. Now that audiences are more media-literate than ever (not to mention generally more pro-gender equality and socially aware than ever) there’s no need to resort to these reductive, familiar ladytropes, right?

Let’s identify some of the most common “Women as Plot Devices” in Western pop culture, discuss why they just don’t really work, and consider some critical discussion of each one. I’ll be focusing more on ‘newer’ tropes (as in, tropes that have more recently been named and identified) as the more common ones are unfortunately super famous and needn’t be defined once again by some chick on the internet.

In order of discovery and listed by their Latin names, we have four main specimens: the Damsel in Distress, the Women in Refrigerators, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and the Sexy Lamp.

Let’s go! Seatbelts, everyone~!

The Damsel in Distress
Women in Refrigerators
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Sexy Lamp